YOWIE researcher Dean Harrison insists he has nearly been killed twice by the mysterious hairy creature.
So when the QT continued our hunt for evidence of the elusive beast in the Ipswich area it was worth having a chat to the man who has had numerous yowie encounters, and interviewed the witness to the sighting of the Mulgowie Yowie back on August 15, 2001.
Harrison, who runs the Australian Yowie Research website, has been searching for yowies for over 20 years.
He has provided a recorded interview with a certain Steve Doyle, who on September 22, 2013 was driving with his wife on the Laidley-Rosewood Rd at dusk when he got one hell of a fright.
“I glanced to the side of the road and it was my height…five foot four. It just looked like a person standing on the side of the road,” Doyle revealed.
“It would have been about 15m away from us at that stage…and as I looked across it was running back into the scrub on all fours (after it was) standing up.
“My wife said ‘that was a bear…that was hairy’ and I said ‘that is just plain weird’.
“At first I thought it was a person in the shadows but then it dropped on all fours and went back out into the paddock.”
Doyle is a hunter and said “it was nothing like I’d seen before”.
“It was black with long hair. It would have been around 80 or 90 kilos…with a normal sized head in comparison to us. It didn’t take off at any great speed. It just loped off.”
Doyle said he was later stunned to learn of a sighting in the region 12 years earlier.
The QT reported on the sighting by a Mrs Crouten near Mulgowie in 2001. Harrison went out on location to interview Mrs Crouten at the time, who was working as a cook for a local doctor and was driving home at night.
Mrs Crouten saw the creature just outside of Mulgowie in her headlights as it was walking on all fours. She was reported as saying that it was covered in hair and “looked like a large version of an Orangutan”.
She was famously quoted as saying that “it had a distinctive monkey’s bottom”.
Shaken, she called the police and was regarded by the senior constable who spoke to her as a credible witness.
“That was a life changing experience for her and she was pretty shaken up about it,” Harrison said.
“Then the police got involved, it all hit the media and she laid low.
“It is a relatively small community and once word got around about the Mulgowie Yowie it was pretty much common knowledge.